I'm writing my thoughts now as there's no way I'll remember any of this to next month.

Flipped games that were free on Epic:

Just Die Already: You're an old person causing chaos. It seems more of
a bad puzzle game, I had a hell of a time getting out of my room with
something like 30 items in it. You loose limbs frequently, even just
tripping which is often. You can respawn with no injuries and it
doesn't seem a setback. I thought it might be like goat sim, but no it
didn't even hold my interest for an half an hour.

Demon's Tilt: 8 bit pinball. This is the worst pinball game I've ever
seen, it's barely responsive and very chunky with poor physics.

Kingdom New Lands: I rather enjoyed the first level of this. It's a
sort of kingdom simulator - but there's only 3 controls. left, right
and money (down.) Deceptively simple at first, you build a town
choosing to spend money on archers, or builders, eventually you get
farmers too, and there's a trader. You can build a number of things
but most are only available on suitable spots. You quickly learn that
you need to be careful where you build and expand. Every night you're
attacked by some sort of humanoid monsters. I played for several hours.
I made a lot of mistakes even after figuring out everything on the first
level. You don't want to upgrade your walls at night as they're gone
while upgrading for instance. 8 bit side scrolling. I eventually found
it a bit tedious as you can only go so fast on your horse to do upgrades
anywhere, and you're very vulnerable with no attacks yourself if you
get caught too far out at night. Maybe worth checking out.

Stubs the Zombie: Might be o.k. but for the bugs. It froze on me
within the first couple minutes, then I got about 5 minutes further
where the NPC robot I'm supposed to be following quit responding. It
doesn't look like a good enough game to struggle through this mess.

Pinball FX: Early access. This one is pretty cool. You get daily
free to play machines, and can upgrade your game room. It feels
slightly sluggish - I'm wondering if that might be my keyboard though.
I wasn't really in the mood for pinball, but it feels like something
I'd come back to if they get out of early access.

Mutant Year Zero Journey to Eden: I had almost bought this one but
less than stellar reviews made me hold off. It's like a mix of early
fallout and gamma world, or Wasteland II. You play a boar-man and
a duck-man and pick up some other kind of mutant along the way. It's
an overhead offset view and combat is turn based. I'm somewhat
enjoying it, but the exploration and combat feels very slow. The
encounters seem to be somewhat set and very difficult. Very on rails.
I haven't been able to get past a very large group of enemies, and
I'm getting tired of reloading and trying again. There doesn't seem
to be anywhere else I can go. I could read some spoilers and hints
I suppose, but I'm not sure I'm into it enough to do that.

- Justisaur

On Sun, 5 Jun 2022 07:07:11 -0700 (PDT), Justisaur
<justisaur@gmail.com> wrote:

>I'm writing my thoughts now as there's no way I'll remember any of this to next month.

>Stubs the Zombie: Might be o.k. but for the bugs. It froze on me
>within the first couple minutes, then I got about 5 minutes further
>where the NPC robot I'm supposed to be following quit responding. It
>doesn't look like a good enough game to struggle through this mess.

It isn't. "Stubbs" was a game I wanted very much to enjoy - it was a
zombie-game before zombies were an overdone trope, it had a unique
style and take on the genre with a lot of gentle humor, and it used
the Halo engine (back when that was impressive). But the game was a
slog.

The levels were overly large; huge simply because they could be and
because big maps were still a selling point. But they were also
disappointingly empty and your character moved so slowly (well, he IS
a zombie), making traversal an extremely tedious chore. There was a
lot of repetition too; Bungie's level design from that era (see Oni
and Halo 1) was infamously grey and uninteresting and "Stubbs" was
possibly the nadir of their designs. Combat - largely limited to melee
(which required slowly walking towards the enemies) - wasn't very
captivating. The developers tried to spice things up with some special
boss encounters, but these proved to be bullet-sponges or annoying
quicktime events. The narrative pacing was awful too.

I struggled to finish the game back in 2005, and every time I've gone
back to give it another try, I've left disappointed. For once, the
fact that a game is so buggy is a blessing; don't try to work your way
through the problems. Just find a better game to play instead.

>Pinball FX: Early access. This one is pretty cool. You get daily
>free to play machines, and can upgrade your game room. It feels
>slightly sluggish - I'm wondering if that might be my keyboard though.
>I wasn't really in the mood for pinball, but it feels like something
>I'd come back to if they get out of early access.
>

*--

Early Access? I have had Pinball FX2 and FX3 on Steam for a long
time.

My favorite pinball games came out a long time ago, on CDs. They had
to be in the drive to play. The graphics and music were awesome. It
was a set of three or four tables. I think one was called ProPinball
Timeshock.

-pw

On Tuesday, June 7, 2022 at 11:13:22 AM UTC-7, PW wrote:
> >Pinball FX: Early access. This one is pretty cool. You get daily
> >free to play machines, and can upgrade your game room. It feels
> >slightly sluggish - I'm wondering if that might be my keyboard though.
> >I wasn't really in the mood for pinball, but it feels like something
> >I'd come back to if they get out of early access.
> >
> *--
>
> Early Access? I have had Pinball FX2 and FX3 on Steam for a long
> time.
>

Um... I have no idea what's going on here. It's the same studio.
FX2 apparently was just an improvement of FX which was only on
the Xbox, not PC. Some sort of shenanigans I guess.

- Justisaur

On Sunday, June 5, 2022 at 7:07:12 AM UTC-7, Justisaur wrote:
> I'm writing my thoughts now as there's no way I'll remember any of
> to next month.

Adding some more flipped games:

* Dead Space 2
* Need for Speed Hot Pursuit
* Guardians of the Galaxy
* Nioh

* Dead Space 2. - Freebie Origin (probably through Prime)
There was a game ending bug right at the
beginning of Dead Space 1 with no fix, I thought I'd try this one.

I thought there was a game ending bug at the beginning for this
too as I couldn't see any way to go, and some cut scene with an
infected who killed me. I bothered to look it up after around
50 deaths, and apparently you're supposed to hit a button to
escape in the quick time. I didn't see any indication of that
the previous few times, but looking for it, I saw "E" pop up
for what seemed a millisecond, and it was in a font barely
distinguishable from what could've been some arty movement
cartoon stuff. So I did get past that but then got stuck
in lab and couldn't find the way from there. That was enough
for me.

This seemed way harder than any DS game I played so far, and
was not fun in the least. Maybe it gets better, but I don't
have that much patience.

-----

* Need for Speed Hot Pursuit - Freebie Origin (Prime)
I'd read a lot about this being one of the best ever driving games
and I had loved the cop DLC for The Crew. I was extremely
disappointed as it seemed to be almost the same as one of the
free mobile NfS games I had played. The only difference being
not having time gates. I had little desire to repeat that.

-----

* Guardians of the Galaxy - full price
This one really makes me sad. I'm not sure what it is, I keep
fiddling with the graphics settings but it looks really bad.
More like a bad CGI cartoon than a comic book. I hadn't noticed
that in the trailers. It's one of those differences
between actually playing and watching a video that just get
missed I guess. I was also turned off by how Gamora looked too,
You'd think in a video game it'd be easier to make someone look
more alien, but she looked more like a normal person wearing bad
face paint than the one in the movies, I can't say Drax is any
better either, and whoever voiced him is much less entertaining
than Steve Bautista. Rocket and Groot are fine at least.

The gameplay is not very fun so far either. While moving
and talking there's a short time window where a small line
pops up in the middle of the screen where you're supposed to
choose a response/party member to back. You'd think that would
be obvious, but with the oversaturated technicolor it kind of
blends in, it also doesn't stay up long and the game doesn't pause
so if you're fighting you have to stop and look to choose
something. If you don't, you just don't say anything. I don't
know that has any effect on anything though.

Combat itself is pretty annoying with the controls, having to
spend several button presses to get anyone else to do something,
and it's hard tracking what's going on with the technicolor
explosion of the backgrounds.

I had thought a movie/comic book video game was relatively safe,
they've gotten a lot better than last millennium where you could
just guarantee one of those would be utter garbage. So again
extremely disappointed especially as I paid full price.

-----

* Nioh, Epic Freebie,
I mentioned in the Maneater thread, but putting here as more
appropriate as I've had no desire to continue it.

> > I'm on Nioh right now which is a souls like set on 1500-1600's Earth
> > (with magic of course.) which as been fun so far (only like 3 hours
> > in.)
> > In true souls fashion I was starting to think "This is too easy"
> >then got my
> > rear handed to me pretty hard immediately after.

> Nioh, maybe just too much souls yet, another 'may come back to game.'
> I was also disappointed to end up in feudal Japan when I found the
> beginning in England more interesting, and with no explanation of
> why everyone in Japan is trying to kill you.

I'll also say this has me warry on Sekiro, as it's another Fromsoft
(DS game) I'm generally not that interested in another Japanese
setting game, don't know why, just not. I have played some in the
past I enjoyed, but it's been a long time. While I have thoroughly
enjoyed (or at least played a lot of hours) every Dark Souls game
I've played. That's 4 games in a row from them with quite a track
record for me which is the only reason I might buy it.

- Justisaur

e-e
(\_/)\
`-'\ `--.___,
'\( ,_.-'
\\
^'

On Sat, 25 Jun 2022 10:35:39 -0700 (PDT), Justisaur
<justisaur@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>On Sunday, June 5, 2022 at 7:07:12 AM UTC-7, Justisaur wrote:
>> I'm writing my thoughts now as there's no way I'll remember any of
>> to next month.

>* Dead Space 2. - Freebie Origin (probably through Prime)
>There was a game ending bug right at the
>beginning of Dead Space 1 with no fix, I thought I'd try this one.

>I thought there was a game ending bug at the beginning for this
>too as I couldn't see any way to go, and some cut scene with an
>infected who killed me. I bothered to look it up after around
>50 deaths, and apparently you're supposed to hit a button to
>escape in the quick time. I didn't see any indication of that
>the previous few times, but looking for it, I saw "E" pop up
>for what seemed a millisecond, and it was in a font barely
>distinguishable from what could've been some arty movement
>cartoon stuff. So I did get past that but then got stuck
>in lab and couldn't find the way from there. That was enough
>for me.

That's a shame, since I think Dead Space 2 is the best of the series.
It's beginning - where you are forced to shamble about completely
helpless, arms bound by a straight jacket, as alien zombies chase
after you, has got to be one of the most intense starts to a game. And
it only gets better from there. The game polishes the controls and
combat mechanics of the first, and has some lovely (in a gory and
horrid sort of way) level design. There's some impressive AI for some
of the monsters too.

The quick-time ending at the game's finish is a bit annoying though...
but that's only a small issue on an otherwise fine game. Give it
another shot; it's well worth the effort.

Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com> writes:

> * Guardians of the Galaxy - full price

> Combat itself is pretty annoying with the controls, having to
> spend several button presses to get anyone else to do something,
> and it's hard tracking what's going on with the technicolor
> explosion of the backgrounds.

I watched some gameplay video around when it came out and it seemed the
combat was pretty hard, i.e. more grindy than fun. It was not like it
was an important battle either, just some random encounter. So I
thought, no. Also not sure I could stand the banter. How many times did
you hear "I am Groot" so far?

On Tuesday, June 28, 2022 at 2:55:05 AM UTC-7, Anssi Saari wrote:
> Justisaur <just...@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > * Guardians of the Galaxy - full price
> > Combat itself is pretty annoying with the controls, having to
> > spend several button presses to get anyone else to do something,
> > and it's hard tracking what's going on with the technicolor
> > explosion of the backgrounds.
> I watched some gameplay video around when it came out and it seemed the
> combat was pretty hard, i.e. more grindy than fun. It was not like it
> was an important battle either, just some random encounter. So I
> thought, no. Also not sure I could stand the banter. How many times did
> you hear "I am Groot" so far?

Groot: "I am Groot!"
Rocket: "You are too mouthy"

That always annoyed me since SW with R2, someone's understanding what
he's saying, it's not like there's anyone else to hear it and not understand
when he and C3-PO are lost on Tatooine.

- Justisaur